this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026
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My windows "start" menu takes at least a full minute to open. Then, when I select, say, Control Panel, it takes another full minute, totally blank with no options
I'm not a programmer or even smart, but isn't that absolute shite? I've used Commodores, Apple II, Macs, 386, 486, have used windows since first job (I don't remember my first Windows version, but it played Tetris in color. Three? haha 3)
Menus have always worked before.
My next laptop will be linux Mint because I like mint ice cream. Does it have menus that open? I am super excited.
I apologize but it made me really mad and now i feel better.
Don't wait for the next laptop, just install Linux now.
It sounds like your laptop is completely unusable anyway, and you can dual boot while you're figuring out if everything works
I have a laptop from work that runs Windows 11 and have the same experience with the unusable start menu. I wasn't allowed to install Linux on the machine. I run Linux on every other machine I have and have used Linux since the 90s.
However after complaining and begging with IT I was allowed to try running Linux on it. It's a managed machine, so I had to do a dual boot from a second drive IT installed for me. If it worked out and IT was happy, I could run Linux.
Unfortunately it was a total failure. The big issue is the CPU is AMD and has on-board graphics that are normally used for everything. However there is also a Nvidia GPU, I think an RTX Pro, which is used for acceleration stuff. In Windows this works well enough, the AMD handles most of the regular display stuff and is plenty powerful for that. The Nvidia gets used to offload certain workloads, to make sure the laptop is usable for certain kinds of software. On Linux this is a configuration that simply isn't supported or working at all. Either it just won't boot or do graphics at all or it's extremely slow and/or unstable or with some effort the Nvidia chip can be completely disabled and just the AMD is used. Basically turning a $2500 laptop into a $1000 one and unable to run certain workloads. Now getting some of that software to run would be hard anyways, as it's not typical software and only supported on certain versions of Windows. But I hadn't even gotten to that stage.
The whole experience reminded me of getting Linux to run on my laptop back in 2002. An unstable mess with half the features missing. Back then I loved the challenge and when I finally got the thing to ping over the PCMCIA wifi card I was super happy. Never did get the sound working on that laptop tho.
Obviously I aborted the experiment and have just accepted Windows 11. It's fucking awful and I bitch about it every time I need to use that machine. But for now, there doesn't seem to be a better option.
I'm surprised they let you dual boot a managed machine, since the Linux installation likely isn't running any of their management software. At my work, we're not allowed to dual-boot, but at least they support Fedora. (their production servers use CentOS and Fedora is close enough that they can reuse a lot of management infrastructure like Chef recipes across both)
See if there's a setting in the BIOS to always use the Nvidia graphics. It'll use more power but should be more reliable.
Hybrid graphics is notoriously buggy on Linux, especially reverse PRIME. Reverse PRIME is used when the video output port on the laptop (DisplayPort, HDMI, whatever) is physically wired to the discrete GPU, but the system is the integrated GPU. There's a well-known bug with reverse PRIME where the screen only updates at 1fps when only using an external monitor (laptop screen is disabled).
Yeah it took some doing on the part of IT. It was only possible using a separate drive and special settings on their part. That way it could be fully managed, but still allow for the dual boot.
Alas the AMD can't be disabled and the Nvidia card can't do display output. It's one of those RTX Pro things that are purely used for compute, not driving a display.